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I’ve done a lot of work with NPS – both using it as the “one metric to rule them all”, as well as using NPS ‘verbatim’ feedback to inform the Confluence product roadmap while at Atlassian.

But one of the questions I asked customers was: “What would you use if you didn’t have Confluence?” The answer was always: “Nothing! There’s nothing else that can do this!”

I love NPS, and it’s a great way to gauge if one company/product is ‘better’ than another if you’re looking to make an angel/VC investment. But a low NPS score (“I won’t recommend…”) might not be a good indicator of stickiness.

That’s where the HWYF test comes in! Ask the simple question:

How would you feel if you could no longer use <product>?

Very disappointed

Somewhat disappointed

Not disappointed

N/A – I no longer use <product>

Only count the percentage of people who answered 1. Very disappointed. According to Sean Ellis, who first wrote about the HWYF test, you want that number to be more than 40%. If it’s significantly less than 40%, you haven’t achieved product/market fit.

So what do you do? One thing is to start segmenting. Is there a difference between male and female users? Do software engineers love your product, but business people don’t? Either double down on the market where you do have product/market fit, or consider rethinking your product.

I did two separate HWYF tests on Twitter, to determine the HWYF score for iPhone and Android phones, both of which I’d argue have achieved great product/market fit. Unsurprisingly, the HWYF score in both cases is well over 40% (but still under 50%)

He makes two valid points: 1. Android is more of a mission to set up and 2. iPhones come with better charger cables.

I agree with Greg that it would be nice to have things that “just work” out of the box. And Apple has played perfectly to the fact that the vast majority of people on the planet, when it comes to having to _learn_ anything tech, are muppets.

But what if you’re not a muppet? What if you speak 4 languages and want a keyboard that automatically figures out, and actively learns, the language you’re texting in (I’m talking about SwiftKey)? It’s actually a feature that’s truly useful, even without dancing ninjas.

So that when you type in “moet” (Afrikaans for “must”) it doesn’t auto-correct it to “Moët”.

Every. Single. Time.

What if you want to be able to simply drag & drop your MP3s to a folder on your phone and they will simply be found and be played? Instead of having to first do a huge iTunes import mission.

Same goes for videos! Why the hell must I struggle converting them to a special Apple format first?

Then there’s the “Photos” app in iOS 7. I have ~800 photos in the “Camera Roll”. Many of them are 5 pictures of the same thing – parents of kids know what I’m talking about. So I pick the best one and add it to an Album (a mission unto itself). I keep doing this until I’ve taken the 100 photos I want to keep and put them into albums. So now I Select All in Camera Roll and select Delete.

*BOOM* All the photos you had meticulously copied into Albums are now also deleted!

Yes, you get a warning… so you get a chance to, erm, … yes… try to figure out which 100 pictures you actually put in albums! So that you can be sure NOT to select those ones. (No, my dear Android users with no exposure to iOS, I’m not kidding. That’s really how the Photos app works.)

We decided to go withResponsivefor Skyrove’s WiFi Hotspot Portal pages for the following reasons:

1. Many, many different screen sizes to cater for

2. We had a very small amount of layout changes and resizing to do (images didn’t even need to be resized)

3. It was definitely going to be more hassle to manage a separate site

4. We were inspired by the Responsive design of Trello.com (check it out by signing up and simply resizing your browser window)

Importantly, at the same time, we took the approach of designing for “Mobile First”. Design would be done for the best mobile experience and only then would the design be adopted for the desktop! (Obviously, as it was responsive, we would already have a working desktop version, albeit not optimized for the larger res)

Keep in mind, that all our users did pretty much the same thing: Login if registered already, Register if not, purchase credits, or login with a roaming partner account (Skype, Boingo, etc). We only had about 3 or 4 pages to worry about.

A few weeks ago one of the companies I work with had a file server dramatically crash after years of faithful service.??The crash cost two days of engineering time to set up a new server from scratch and restore files from backups. Even before the crash, it would take engineering time to add new users and set permissions. The permissions were never really done properly and many folders were accessible simply by using a shared username & password that made the rounds.??

There were also occasional issues with files being overwritten with older versions and work needing to be redone!??

Running their own "cheap" in-house server was actually getting expensive and introducing huge amounts of risk. Some of the employees at the company started using their personal Dropbox accounts for handling mission critical files such as accounting records. This had the benefit of giving Revision Control up to one year and rollbacks in case of files getting corrupted. Folders could also be shared, but, the file ownership was by nature "personal". If an employee left the company it would create security problems.??

Although it's a Cloud Storage Service, your files are synchronized across all your devices, thus meaning fast, local access at all times without the need of an internet connection.??

At first, I thought the price came in a bit steep at $795 per year for 5 users, or $13.25 per user per month. You could buy a half-decent Ubuntu server for $795, but the cost of setting it up properly, maintaining it, security and lost productivity quickly adds up to thousands of dollars. Professional companies in Cape Town charge in the region of $500 a month for basic server monitoring & maintenance and callout fees of $100 per hour.??